A number of methods and technologies have been developed to handle the transmission of data depending on the intended use of the data. For example, XML (Extensible Markup Language) allows the sender to construct common information formats and share both the format and the data on the World Wide Web, intranets, and elsewhere. Computer makers may agree on a standard or common way to describe the information about a computer product (processor speed, memory size, and so forth) and then describe the product information format with XML. Such a standard way of describing data would enable a user to send an intelligent agent (a program) to each computer maker's Web site, gather data, and then make a valid comparison. Another example is ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation One), which is a standard way to describe a message (unit of application data) that can be sent or received in a network. ASN.1 has two parts: (1) the rules of syntax for describing the contents of a message in terms of data type and content sequence or structure and (2) how you actually encode each data item in a message. IDL (interface definition language) is a further example, and is a generic term for a language that lets a program or object written in one language communicate with another program written in an unknown language so that new objects can be sent to any platform environment and discover how to run in that environment.
There does not appear to be any methods or technologies that provide secure transmission of sets of related data items, encode the data set in a textual and compact manner with an embedded integrity check and use a single key or template to determine the order and representation of the data.